Tel Aviv: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas must start preparing for a leadership transition next month when his Fatah movement that rules the West Bank holds its first party conference in seven years, a senior official said.
“Now Abu Mazen is 81 years old, and we do need a transition period,” said Jibril Rajoub, deputy secretary of Fatah’s central committee, using Abbas’s nickname. Abbas “has to play a godfather role in this next period,” he said in an interview in his office outside Jerusalem.
Decisions made at the conference in Ramallah will have implications not only for Fatah and its bitter Palestinian rival Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, but also for peacemaking with Israel and for the foreign donor countries that provide most of the Palestinian Authority’s budget.
While more than 1,000 Fatah members have been invited to convene at the end of November to pick the party’s leadership for the next five years, that’s only about a third of the number that attended the 2009 meeting. The restricted list strengthens Abbas’s hand over the outcome, said Jihad Harb, a researcher at the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah.
Abbas is under pressure from Arab countries to pick a successor and assure a peaceful transition when he leaves the stage, he said. Limiting the number of Fatah activists attending will give Abbas “the ability to manage the party’s agenda and, most importantly, to control the elections of the central committee,” Harb said.
Abbas, the long-time deputy to Palestine Liberation Organisation Chairman Yasser Arafat, became Palestinian Authority president in January 2005 for what was supposed to be a four-year term. Subsequent elections were never held.
Abbas has generally eschewed violence but in recent years has refused to negotiate with Israel unless its government halts colony construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Palestinian law specifies that a new president be chosen by popular election, but an agreement to hold a ballot has eluded Hamas and Fatah since the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007. The PLO, the umbrella group that signed agreements with Israel establishing the Palestinian Authority, could argue it has the status to override the basic law and name a successor. That makes next month’s leadership conference of Fatah, the main PLO faction, even more consequential.
Rajoub, 63, says he doesn’t aspire to succeed Abbas and Arafat as “a patriarch,” preferring to focus on holding his post in Fatah and maybe “taking the helm” of the party. Others would lead the PLO and the PA. “The future regime cannot be a one-man show,” he said.
In and out of Israeli prisons during the 1970s and 1980s for militant activity, Rajoub learnt fluent Hebrew in jail. He became head of the Preventive Security Force in the West Bank after the Palestinian Authority was formed in 1994, later becoming Arafat’s national security adviser.
Rajoub challenged the exiled Mohammad Dahlan to return for the Fatah conference and prove his popularity if he wants to succeed Abbas. In 2014, Dahlan was convicted in absentia of “defaming Abbas” and sentenced to two years in prison, making it dangerous for him to return while Abbas remains in power. Dahlan, who has been in exile since narrowly escaping a police raid on his West Bank home, denies any wrongdoing.
“We will give him all the guarantees” to return without being arrested, Rajoub said, though he added that Dahlan ultimately would have to appear in court to face the charges.
Separately, Rajoub — who also serves as president of the Palestinian Football Association and the Palestine Olympic Committee — said he plans to appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland, if soccer’s global governing body doesn’t suspend six Israeli teams based in West Bank colonies.
